An Interval PR on the Midtown Track

After getting back from camping with the boys this past weekend, we unpacked a few things, started some laundry, and then took off for the Midtown track so I could do some intervals. (It was 91 and humid outside, and I had the boys as my wife worked, so I didn't want to push them outside while trying to run hard.) They hung out by the indoor track (sometimes giving me high-fives) as I did a quick workout.

It was my "standard" indoor track workout that I did last in January: the track is 6 laps/mile, so I did efforts of 2, 4, 6, 4, and 2 laps. Then I'd run an easy lap between each effort. That's 3 miles of HARD running in the end, while taking my "fast" splits ever 2 laps (1/3 of a mile).

As with most of my interval workouts as I get older, I didn't have a specific goal. I was hoping to keep them under 6:00 pace, but I didn't know what over 24 hours of crappy camping food would do to my efforts. I was just in it to suffer. Here's what I ran:

- 1:49
- 1:18 easy
- 1:50, 1:50 = 3:41
- 1:20 easy
- 1:53, 1:52, 1:51 = 5:37
- 1:24 easy
- 1:52, 1:51 = 3:44
- 1:24 easy
- 1:44

16:35 total hard time for the 3 miles - beats previous PR of 17:02 in mid-January!

And my "easy" laps were faster this time too! (My slowest "easy" lap was 8:24/mile pace.) I've never ran a 1:44 for 2 laps either (both of those laps were 0:52, which is 5:12/mile pace).

I realized after the 2nd interval why my times were so good. This workout is usually a "it's too icy or crappy outside to run fast, so I'll do some fast running indoors" workout that happens in the middle of winter. NO ONE around here is at their fastest in the middle of winter. So doing this workout in late June with 2 track workouts, a 1500 track meet, and a road mile under my belt over the last 6 weeks means this SHOULD have been a PR workout. As it was.

Here's the link to when I did this workout last back in January, and in that post, there are links to this workout over the last few years.